Borderlands: words against walls

Both material and figurative walls are shaping our present. Now is the
time for the arts and humanities to intervene with critical reflection and
compassion into spaces of ‘crisis’.

Pebble poetry. Photo: Agnes WoolleyThe turmoil surrounding the
presidential election in America has shaken the world: fear, terror,
uncertainty and despair are some of the feelings generated by this new
political turn, or what Cornel West has called a ‘catastrophe’. Significantly,
we are reminded
that ‘27 years after the Berlin Wall fell, Europe wakes up
to a U.S. president-elect promising one of his own’.

Yet, another wall has
already been erected in Calais, allegedly to ‘stop refugees trying to board lorries
to UK’,
while the Calais jungle in France has been shut down and evacuated, leaving
many destitute and numerous unaccompanied children in limbo. As we witness the
triumph of populism, racism and bigotry translated into a proliferation of
frontiers and divisions, Gloria Anzaldúa’s words from nearly three decades ago painfully
resonate with our present times, which seem deaf to the harrowing cry of
history: ‘the US-Mexican border es una herida abierta (an open wound) where the Third
World grates against the first and bleeds. […] Tension grips the inhabitants of the borderlands like a virus.
Ambivalence and unrest reside there and death is no stranger’. The wall promised by Trump announces a curb on migration
which will exponentially exacerbate already adverse and violent international
migration politics and practices and, ultimately, disseminate fear.

Nobel laurate Toni Morrison’s reflections
in the New Yorker on this new
political turn talk precisely of fear: ‘So scary are the consequences of a
collapse of white privilege that many Americans have flocked to a political
platform that supports and translates violence against the defenceless as
strength. These people are not so much angry as terrified, with the kind of
terror that makes knees tremble’. Yet Morrison elsewhere reminds us that while the ‘world
is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it
is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos
contains information that can lead to knowledge — even wisdom. Like art’. In times of war and conflicts, the arts and
humanities have played a vital role in enabling the healing process amongst
communities, cultures and societies. As Gayatri Spivak says, the humanities ‘are the healthcare system of cultures’ and our work acquires an even more meaningful
role in these times.

Are
we living through a period of crisis? It’s a term that has been used
ubiquitously to describe current levels of migration and displacement. But what
is the nature of
the crisis we, in the West, are facing? Perhaps what’s going on is not so much
a ‘refugee crisis’, but a crisis of values: a critical moment in our
understanding of what we value as a society. This crisis of values has
immobilised nation-states and intergovernmental bodies whose responses to
current levels of migration in and around Europe’s borders has been increased
militarisation and border controls, shady refugee exchange deals, and a
reluctance to welcome refugees. Zygmunt Bauman has called this a ‘crisis of
humanity’ in his recent commentary Strangers
at Our Door.

So, how can the arts and humanities help us in a crisis? Political
theorist Wendy Brown makes the case for the importance of
criticism and critical thinking at times of crisis. She notes the tendency to
divide theory from practice by dismissing theorising as unnecessary at times of
crisis. People say: “now’s not the time for theorising; we need action”. But,
she says, the original Greek term – Krisis
– describes a moment when urgent deliberation is required, when critique itself
is urgent, or, from the same root ‘critical’. This sense still persists in
medicine, when we say someone is in a ‘critical condition’. We also talk about
a time being a ‘critical moment’. This sense of
critical decision-making also extends to refugees themselves and the critical,
often life-threatening, decisions they are making daily. Now, is perhaps a critical
moment – one where urgent deliberation about Europe’s approach to refugees is
required.

The
inaugural event of the network
engaged with the issue of ‘crisis’ and raised a number of other important
questions: How
can we enable productive collaborations on the issue of forced migration?; Who
are the intended audiences of the artistic practices by or about refugees?; How
can we create a third space for dialogue about refugees that is not political
or personal, but social?

Our aim was to share knowledge, skills and experience in the
area of forced migration and we heard from academics, arts practitioners, and
those who work in the voluntary sector. We gained valuable context in the form
of the historical legacy of colonialism from Roger Bromley, who argued that a
sense of history is a vital component of our response to crisis, and Neelam Srivastava raised important
questions about contemporary and historical practices of commemoration for
refugees, showing a clip from Dagmawi Yimer’s 2013 film Asmat/Names. Taking us into the mechanics
of seeking asylum, Anthony Good and Carolina
Albuerne
spoke from their research and practice with asylum claimants, exposing the
inadequacies of current systems for applying for asylum and raising crucial
questions like: how can we get better at facilitating refugees to speak for
themselves? What constitutes self-representation? And how can we be better
advocates with a sense of our own positioning? Kristin Shirling, who has been
working with Good Chance theatre in the Calais
‘Jungle’, voiced her strong support for the role of the arts in situations of
crisis, arguing that when one is dehumanised, a place to ‘be a human being’ is
vitally important. Detention
Action’s
Jerome Phelps’s discussion of the spatialisation of power worked across
scholarly and practice-based approaches to forced migration by grounding his
comments in the campaign against the UK Government’s detention estate.

An evening of poetry and film at Keele Hall (which,
incidentally, had a brief incarnation as a refugee camp during WWII) forged
connections between the arts and the ideas and questions that had arisen during
the day. We heard from poets James Sheard, Saradha
Soobrayen
and Robert Hampson and the audience were
encouraged to participate through ‘Pebble Poetry’. Pebbles inscribed with
words, phrases and thoughts from participants enabled mutual sharing and
reflection on the meaning of welcome, arrival and displacement. Poetry was a
means to collectively address the challenges of our present and to think about
how our world is offering, or failing to offer, ‘refuge’. The pebbles will travel from Keele to Naples in
Italy and to London – our next scheduled events – ultimately building a shore
to safety and offering a welcome written in stone.

Our project is fuelled by a renewed energy in these
increasingly challenging times. As Toni Morrison insists: ‘this
is precisely the time when artists go to work.
There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no
room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations
heal’.

Read extract from ‘Sounds Like Root Shock’: a poetic inquiry into the depopulation of the Chagos Archipelago by Saradha Soobrayen.

About the authors

Mariangela Palladino is a lecturer in Postcolonial Studies at the
University of Keele, and has previously held academic posts at the
universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh and Coimbra (Portugal). Her research
interests are at the intersection of postcolonial literatures and
cultures, migration and diaspora, and interdisciplinary methods.
Mariangela is a member of the Glasgow Refugee Asylum and Migration
Network GRAMNet

Agnes Woolley is Lecturer in Contemporary Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the author of Contemporary Asylum Narratives: Representing Refugees in the Twenty-First Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and has published extensively on postcolonial literature, theatre and film, with a focus on migration, diaspora and climate change. She is also a trustee at Streatham Drop-In Centre for Asylum Seekers and Refugees.

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